San Francisco Bay Bridge Lights Up Ethernet-Enabled LEDs

The famous Bay Bridge over at San Francisco is one iconic sight (although not as famous as the Golden Gate, but still..), and it is going to get even more famous now when 25,000 LEDs light up along a section which measures a whopping 1.8 miles in length, every single night for the next two years. It was from Tuesday evening when the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was transformed into a massive, two-year-long public art project that is known as The Bay Lights.

The Bay Lights will be “up for display” until 2am the next day, as a dazzling array of 25,000 LEDs get the job done. Sporting an assortment of seemingly-animated patterns, these LEDs were strung vertically on the bridge’s twisted steel cables. To make matters more interesting, individual LEDs can be addressed over an Ethernet, copper wire, and fiber optic network, where they are filtered by 528 power and data supply boxes. Word has it that a constant stream of around 32Mbps of data flow across that network in order to provide full control for all 25,000 LEDs.

The entire piece of art cost around $8 million in private donations, with a total of approximately $22,000 in electricity bills throughout the two years being part of it, while the rest include installation, maintenance and removal, of course.